Traditional contact centers, which are examples of a point-of-contact (POC) for a customer seeking assistance for a product or service, generally rely on traditional communication systems. Conventional contact center platforms route customer service requests to various contact center resources, such as interactive voice response (IVR) bridges, agent's telephones, etc., that are connected using a traditional exchange or switch, such as a private branch exchange (PBX) or a Softswitch. If a customer is routed to one resource, e.g., IVR bridge, but fails to achieve full satisfaction, it may be necessary to route the customer to another resource, e.g., an agent, to complete the interaction. In a conventional call center platform connecting between the various resources is accomplished by sequentially transferring or handing off the customer to required resources via the exchange or switch.
Routing a customer service request using a conventional contact center platform generally proceeds in the following manner. First, a user initiates a service request by “calling” the contact center. The customer's call is accepted by, for example, the call center's PBX. The PBX routes the customer to a first resource, which may be an IVR bridge. The IVR bridge performs an initial interaction with the customer and extracts customer information and choices in order to determine whether the customer requires additional resources. In some instances the IVR is able to accumulate and dispense the necessary information to resolve the call. Often, the IVR bridge determines that it is necessary for the customer to interact with an agent or be transferred to other resources. In such transfers, the customer is returned to the PBX, which places the customer in a queue until an agent or other resource becomes available. Once an agent or other resource becomes available, the customer is transferred to that agent or resource. Depending upon the complexity of the service request, the agent may require additional resources to service the customer, such as authorization from the agent's supervisor, and the customer is, again, transferred. Transferring the customer among resources continues until the service request is satisfied or the service request is terminated.
Thus, in a conventional contact center platform, the customer is sequentially transferred to the next required resource via an exchange or switch, such as a PBX or Softswitch. As such, the customer's interaction with the contact center is subject to the limitations of the PBX or Softswitch, which include the tendency to unintentionally terminate the service request (“drop the call”). In addition, the pattern of transfer, wait, and connect can be repeated so often that customer satisfaction is negatively impacted. Tracking of the caller can also be adversely affected since the caller is continually transferring through the exchange or switch.
Separately, such traditional systems are limited if the customer's needs change over the course of the service request. Since the customer is sequentially transferred among resources, it becomes difficult to provide selected resources in real-time. Consequently, such traditional systems often cannot adequately manage the contact center resources and guarantee that the customer is being serviced by the appropriate resource at a given point of time during the service request.
Additional limitations can include the inability to permit the user to access a body of resources while on a call. The communications of such traditional contact centers are often limited to voice and IVR menus. When the customer is transferred to an agent, the agent might be able to connect a wider selection of resources, but transfers are often misapplied and the calls are lost. Further, in such cases, the time that the user remains waiting is lost. In such time periods, the customer is essentially locked down.
The limitations of such traditional systems have resulted in customers long dreading such calls. The calls being driven through the IVR traditionally take so long that, even if a call is not dropped as a result of a failed transfer, it is dropped as the caller moves into a zone of limited connectivity, as when the caller is using their cell phone in a moving car.